To get Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), OpenBSD 3.4 and a decent bootloader onto my Powerbook so I'll be able to have the latest Mac OS X as well as be able to play with any other arbitrary OS, portably. The bootloader also needs to look cool.
Why OpenBSD? It's something new, it's minimal, and it's well documented. If you are unaware of the OpenBSD mentality, check out the OpenBSD project goals. I dual-boot Linux and Windows on my Desktop, plus I'll soon be running Solaris on a separate machine, so I feel the need to cover all my bases. However, I would like to see how well Debian GNU/Linux runs on it...
Update: I'm now running Ubuntu Linux on my Powerbook (via a network install) and I'm enjoying it.
I have a Apple Powerbook G3 (Firewire), or "Pismo," with a 18.6 GB hard drive and 768 MB of RAM. I have no working CD-ROM so I have to partition and install the operating systems via "target disk mode," where I plug my laptop into an extra Mac, which thinks it's a regular old FireWire hard drive. In this case, the extra Mac was a shiny new G5.
yaboot, the bootloader that lets me pick which OS I want to use when starting my Powerbook, recommends having its own partition. Too bad I'm not using Linux at all, otherwise using this would be easy.
I put my Powerbook into target disk mode, plugged it into an extra Mac and partitioned it with Apple's Disk Utility:
I'll be giving OpenBSD about 500 MB of swap.
After partitioning I popped in the first Panther CD and restarted while holding down the "C" key to boot from CD. I slimmed down the Mac OS X install as much as I could to speed up install time.
One really interesting thing was that during and after installation my Powerbook's Mac OS X partition became "blessed" and caused the host extra mac to boot from it. I was afraid that the installer would do some sort of G5-specific stuff, but everything went smoothly. I took advantage of the G5's muscle and made my laptop fully up-to-date while it was plugged in.
Software install checklist:
As a final interesting note, I forgot to install the developer tools and thus had to plug my Powerbook back into the extra Mac later on. I started the extra Mac up while holding the "z" key to make it look for an attached temporary device to boot from.
I followed the instructions at OpenBSD/macppc and at OpenBSD/ibook. After install OS X, I copied
"ofwboot," "bsd" and "bsd.rd" to the root of my HFS+ partition for Mac OS X from the OpenBSD/macppc FTP site. I rebooted
into OpenFirmware and typed "boot
hd:,ofwboot bsd.rd" and bam! An OpenBSD installer!
Personal notes on the install:
After installation, the brightness keys work when striking them repeatedly (not when
holding them down). "startx" should work out of the box, too. Control-click on
the mouse won't work, but an external USB mouse with scrollwheel will.
In the XF86Config-4 I had to set the device driver to "r128." I also changed the DefaultDepth to 24 instead of 8. This causes some serious weirdness in the console, however.
Almost all of yaboot's documentation assumes that you're going to install yaboot on a separate, devoted bootstrap partition and that you're going to run the yaboot configuration commands from Linux. I'm doing neither.
The yaboot HOWTO quickly mentions that using yaboot without a dedicated partition isn't supported, suggested, or probably moral. Also, you need to be running Linux to execute their tools. I'm stuck for now...
Update: I never got yaboot to do OpenBSD. Bah.
See also: Linux Laptop and Notebook Installation Survey: Apple (aka Macintosh), which also contains information about installing non-Linux operating systems
© Ian Langworth